White Paper Global Technology Governance

The document assesses the fragmented landscape of global technology governance in 2019, highlighting a lack of coherence across different levels of government and sectors. It identifies five priority cross-cutting issues—privacy and security, interoperability, access and inclusion, employment and skills, and environmental sustainability—and proposes a framework for governments, industry, and civil society to collaborate through agile, human-centered policy-making to overcome barriers like digital protectionism and expertise gaps.

• Global technology governance is currently underdeveloped and fragmented, characterized as a "patchwork of approaches" with a significant lack of coherence both vertically (across government and organizational layers) and horizontally (across countries and disciplines).
• The rapid pace and convergence of Fourth Industrial Revolution technologies create a 'pacing problem' and 'policy decay,' where traditional regulatory cycles cannot keep up with technological diffusion, leading to governance that falls behind new business models.
• Five priority cross-cutting governance issues have been identified across multiple technology domains, including AI, drones, precision medicine, IoT, autonomous vehicles, and blockchain: privacy and security, interoperability, access and inclusion, employment and skills development, and environmental sustainability.
• There is a critical tension between individual data privacy and public security, with some governments implementing 'backdoors' or banning encrypted services like WhatsApp and Signal to prevent 'law-free zones' for criminal activity.
• Digital protectionism and restrictive data policies have risen steadily since 2006, creating a 'prisoners dilemma' where nations prioritize control over infrastructure and data, thereby limiting global economic output.
• Emerging technologies pose significant environmental risks, such as the high energy cost of training NLP machine learning models—comparable to four lifetimes of car emissions—and the energy-intensive nature of cryptocurrency mining.
• The document advocates for 'agile governance,' which employs systems and design thinking to create inclusive, human-centered policies that can be rapidly iterated and updated to match the speed of technological change.
• A significant 'expertise gap' exists within governments, where policy leaders often lack a deep understanding of the attributes and impacts of emerging technologies, hindering the development of successful governance protocols.

APA

World Economic Forum (2019). White Paper Global Technology Governance. http://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_Global_Technology_Governance.pdf

Chicago

World Economic Forum. White Paper Global Technology Governance. 2019. http://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_Global_Technology_Governance.pdf.

Wikipedia

{{cite report |author=World Economic Forum |title=White Paper Global Technology Governance |date=October 2019 |url=http://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_Global_Technology_Governance.pdf |access-date=23 October 2026 |via=Climate Insights Directory}}

BibTeX

@techreport{worldeconomicforum2019white, author = {{World Economic Forum}}, title = {{White Paper Global Technology Governance}}, institution = {World Economic Forum}, year = {2019}, month = oct, url = {http://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_Global_Technology_Governance.pdf}, urldate = {2026-10-23}, note = {Indexed by Climate Insights Directory} }